“... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...”

“... to create a disciplined workforce and to the ways slaves resisted his demands. He was ‘by no means an easy man to work for’. He insisted that slaves and hired workers adhere to his own highly demanding work ethic. ‘I expect my people,’ he wrote to one overseer, ‘will work from daybreaking until it is dusk,’ a regimen which in summer, as ...”

“... the teller is as important as the tale, there is no advantage to withholding information about the means by which the narrator arrived at the story, or why he cares. Knowing that every description of Pinto’s thoughts is derived from Rahela’s account of her conversations with him makes a difference. It goes some way to explaining the caricatural nostalgia ...”

“... as a set of demands that served as a precursor to full equality for all. Socialism was the means to ensure the enlargement of rights beyond those enshrined in the text – individual and public freedoms – to the economic domain. This was the core of his liberal socialism: anti-determinist; inflected by a belief in the noneconomic needs of individuals ...”

“... Despite the weight of sometimes conflicting detail, however, a distinctive view of what the strike means in the 2020s emerges from Gildea’s testimonies.The more familiar high politics interpretation of the dispute is disrupted by regional perspectives. Gildea tells us, for example, that it didn’t in fact start at Cortonwood: he interviews miners from ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”

“... to suffer. Retributive justice was important, but the caliphate also encouraged loyalty by other means. Tamimi has translated the lyrics of dozens of anasheed – patriotic anthems written and recorded by the state’s Ajnad Foundation for Media Production. They vary in quality. Removing the ‘stain of humiliation’ is a common theme, as are the glories ...”

“... corporate executives were under mounting pressure to keep stock prices high by any means necessary, in order to maintain access to cheap finance and the investment funds required to compete; the fact that they had come to depend heavily on stock options for their own compensation naturally quickened the temptation. One after another great ...”

“... not the aspect of Proust that appealed to Forster. Rickie, in The Longest Journey, is a writer, or means to be, but he’s not writing The Longest Journey. Forster notes that Proust ‘takes any and every way, moves backwards and forwards as he likes, led not by the story but by the psychological movement behind it’. Admirable, but not really for him. He ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or ...”

“... medicines, but that it is true. Johnson’s ecclesiastical cynicism – where ‘strength’ means only ‘strength for the Church’ – suspends what is most powerful about Christianity: its claim to be true. Instead he offers the milder language of success: does it work for you? To defend religion’s success is not to defend it. It is to undermine ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... into the 1960s, Jenkins declared that the aim of politics should be ‘to use prosperity as a means to a more civilised and tolerant community’, which led him to this revealing statement of belief: ‘One of the central purposes of democratic socialism is to extend throughout the community the freedom of choice which was previously the prerogative of ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”